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Things I Never Said

Roger Ebert tweeted what he thought was a quote of mine yesterday. It’s been retweeted “100+ times” — which could mean many more — and many are reacting to it.

Nice of Mr. E. to name check me, but there’s one little problem:

I never said it.

During the neverending video-games-are-or-aren’t-art debate on Ebert’s blog, several people brought me up, citing my definition of art from Understanding Comics, and one of them paraphrased the definition which Ebert then put quotes around and tweeted.*

Here’s what I actually said way back in 1993:

“Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.”

…followed by pages of explanations of how I don’t see art as an either/or proposition, but a component of human behavior that exists to varying degrees in nearly everything we do.

Got it?

Now here’s the paraphrased (i.e., wrong) version that was rampaging across the Twittersphere yesterday:

“Art is is something people do that doesn’t get them money or sex.” (Scott McCloud)

Not quite the same.

So… Knowing how these things work, I just thought I’d make special mention of it here so that maybe the correction will follow the meme, at least enough to keep it off my tombstone.

Funny how the inaccurate quote is pithier and contains the buzzword “sex”…but money and survival are incredibly not the same thing. And people do art for money all the time. Unfortunately I agree that the wrong quote will live on.

I’m pretty sure the quote will eventually morph into “Artists are people who get neither money nor sex.”

It is a shame that some people may come away from this with the mistaken belief that you are entirely on Ebert’s side, i.e. claiming that video games cannot be considered art. But I’m sure your books will outlive the erroneous quote by a good long time.

awww man. That must be SO frustrating. I would hate if that happened to me. Not that I’m famous enough to even be misquoted. It really is a shame, because even if you were quoted accurately, the quote out of context doesn’t really represent your art-as-a-spectrum belief. Sound-bite culture leads to so many misunderstandings.

When I read it I immediately thought that quote didn’t “sound” like you. But the thing is, what you tried to explain in UC is hard to summarize in a short, catchy phrase. Maybe “Art is anything we do that isn’t motivated by our instincts of survival or reproduction” would’ve been closer.

But hey, the misquote is kinda haunting and maybe it’ll make people check out UC so they can understand what did you really mean. So it’s cool. No publicity is bad publicity, right?

“I really love the definition for art that Scott McCloud gave in his seminal work, Understanding Comics. I wish I could directly quote it. To boil it down somewhat, those things we do (or perhaps the works that we create) that do not specifically contribute to our safety or our property might be considered art. I’m sure that I’ve mangled that in paraphrasing.l

So, no. I didn’t officially misquote you. I even acknowledged that it was a mangled paraphrase. Of course, I may have posted twice on Ebert’s blog. I don’t remember anymore.

In a bizarre way, I am reminded of the movie “King of Kong”. You would think the director has portrayed Billy Mitchell as a ego-centric maniac who would stop at nothing to preserve his integrity against a relative newcomer such as Steve Weibe, when in fact in real life, the two had a lot of respect for each other. Yet because of the movie, people see Billy and Steve from the director’s point of view.

That said, it’s easy to get misquoted. It’s different when it becomes deliberate.